Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 and Its Changing Timeline

Nearly a week after Malaysian Airlines Flight MH370 disappeared, officials are still at a loss for what happened to the jetliner carrying 239 people. New details suggest that the flight was in the air far longer than previously thought and deliberate action was taken to divert the plane off course.

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As the fate and the location of the plane remains a mystery, investigators have been able to reconstruct a timeline of the plane's last contacts.

12:41 a.m.: Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 takes off from Kuala Lumpur International Airport in Malaysia heading for Beijing, China. The plane shows up on radar two minutes after taking off.

1:07 a.m.: The last automated data transmission is sent from the plane. U.S officials told ABC News they believe that sometime after this transmission the data reporting system was shut down.
Sometime after this transmission Kuala Lumpur's air traffic control tells the plane's pilot they are handing off to air traffic control based in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. The pilot responds, "All right. Good night."

1:21 a.m.: The plane's transponder, which transmits location and altitude, shuts down. Sources told ABC News that U.S. officials are “convinced that there was a manual intervention.”

1:22 a.m.: MH370 should have come to the navigational way-point called Igari point. Before it reached this point, Vietnamese air traffic control noticed they had lost contact with MH370, according to the Vietnam’s Civil Aviation Authority.

1:30 a.m.: The last moment that the plane was seen by Malaysian radar.

1:38 a.m.: Air traffic control in Ho Chi Minh City informs Kuala Lumpur air traffic control about the signal loss.
Ho Chi Minh City asks two other planes to contact MH370. Neither plane is able to raise the pilot of MH370. At least one of the planes report getting a “buzz signal” and no voices, then losing the signal.

2:15 a.m.: Malaysian military defense radar picks up traces of the plane hundreds of miles west of MH370’s last contact point. The plane crosses over the Peninsular Malaysia and into the Strait of Malacca. The Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak said Saturday that the flight path was “consistent with deliberate action by someone on the plane.”

Following hours: In the hours after contact was lost MH370 "pings" a satellite several times. It's not clear if those pings include data that could reveal the plane's location.
The Malaysian prime minister said Saturday that the satellite data revealed that the plane flew for approximately seven more hours after dropping off of radar.

6:32 a.m.: A broadcast call was made from Kuala Lumpur's air traffic control on emergency frequencies asking MH370 to call them.

6:51 a.m.: A broadcast call was made from Ho Chi Minh City's air traffic control on emergency frequencies asking MH370 to call them.

8:11 a.m.: The fight makes its last communication with a satellite seven hours and 31 minutes after taking off. Due to the amount of time the plane was in the air, officials are now searching an expansive region covering 5,000 miles from Kazakhstan to the South Indian Ocean